Beyond where species go: integrating SDMs, functional traits, and the Tree of Life to anticipate climate‑driven change in ecosystem functioning

Bruno Eleres Soares , Romullo Guimarães de Sá Ferreira Lima, Jessica Reemeyer, Thais A. Bernos, Christophe Brabant, Rikki Gumbs, Nicholas E. Mandrak, Luciano Fogaça de Assis Montag, Carla Ferreira Rezende, Janaína Serrano, Zohra Zahir

Forecasting biodiversity under climate-change scenarios typically involves applying species distribution models (SDMs) to project shifts in the areas where abiotic conditions are suitable for a given species under future climates, often interpreted as gains or losses in species ranges. Although the impacts of species loss are often quantified using measures of functional or evolutionary irreplaceability, SDM outputs are rarely translated into changes in ecosystem functioning or evolutionary diversity. If climate change reshapes species distribution non-randomly, disproportionately affecting particular functional groups or phylogenetic lineages, the consequences might extend beyond species occurrence and result in the erosion of ecosystems services, functional redundancy, and adaptive potential. SDMs implicitly forecast changes in community composition, and such changes can be directly translated into shifts in functional and phylogenetic structure when paired with additional ecological information. We advocate linking SDMs with functional traits and phylogenetic information to create two complementary tools that can support decision-making and policy: i) a species-level indicator summarizing the net effects of a species’ distributional shift to the pool of functional and phylogenetic services; and, ii) scalable site-based indicators summarizing the net changes in the functional and phylogenetic pool. This framework supports the implementation of the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) by linking climate-driven SDMs to changes in ecosystem functioning, resilience, and evolutionary diversity, which are the dimensions central to Targets 4, 8, and 10 of KMGBF. This approach moves from where species go to what might change in ecosystem functioning, directly supporting a climate adaptation to the global commitments of protecting nature’s contributions to people and safeguarding Earth’s evolutionary history, which would help bridge the gap between biodiversity policy goals and current monitoring approaches.